This, or some variant, is a pretty strong meme on the right, I suspect. I find it familiar. Real familiar. (I used to be a sort of rightie-cum-anarchist, or think I was.)
The problem with this view is, of course, that ethics of fairness & institutions of law exist in the first place to govern interactions with persons beyond one’s monkeysphere/Dunbar number. That’s true whether they’re liberal or conservative institutions, whether they’re liberal or conservative principles. We are civilized because even if we don’t care much about those beyond our monkeysphere, we learn how to behave with outsiders.
This formulation may actually be on the order of someone thinking that something is impossible simply because he doesn’t know how it works.
So, can some form of this be defended logically, or is it just, “I expect people to behave, deep down, like chimps, even though religion & social acculturation have an established track record training us to be better.”?
I don’t think it has any strong ties to the right and I’m unaware of any publication or popularization that’s rooted as such. It’s just something I’ve thought about on my own. However, that doesn’t mean other folks (who may or may not be conservative) independently thought the same things.
To clarify, my comment was about fiscal policies and not about long standing fundamental Golden Rule interactions.
For example, a simple law such as, “Thou Shall Not Kill” can scale up from a family of 4 to a group of 300 million citizens. That’s not the context I was talking about.
When conservatives & liberals debate on SDMB, it’s usually focused around economic disagreements. Although abortion and school prayer is also a Left vs Right hotbutton issue, it’s not the typical fare on this message board. My comment was an observation of economic limitations.
I’m talking about grand ideas like Medicare, UHC, affirmative action, etc that tries to dole out cosmic justice with economic policies. Most citizens do not understand debt, the origin of money, the difference between wealth and money, compound interest, deficit spending. Therefore, it’s easier for the ignorant to elect politicians promising them the most rewards. Because of the social disconnection between the benefactors and the taxpayers (beyond the Dunbar Number), there is no built-in checks & balance (guilt, gratitude, whatever you want to call it) for the system to find a healthy equilibrium that everyone is happy with. Instead, we get a trillion dollar debts which politicians blame on the previous politicians.
I remember now that I actually first learned of Dunbar’s Number from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point.”
If you know anything about Gladwell, you’d know his political persuasion definitely leans to the Left. So ironically, I got the meme from one of your teammates.
In chapter 5 of his book, he applies Dunbar’s observations to movies/books and how they spread in popularity. He also applies it to well-run companies where employee groups of a certain size don’t necessarily need a crack-the-whip leader. He does not apply it to political economic policies. That’s just something I did (apologies to Mr. Gladwell and possibly Mr. Dunbar as well.)
Things aren’t egalitarian in small communities (i.e. tribal villages) of a hundred people either. Or at least not because of Dunbar’s number. It’s because they’re too busy trying to survive to have the free time to try and lord over one another.
But there’s plenty of evidence that we all are lead by the chimp brain. We are largely monogamous. We are sociopathic towards non-pack members. We raise our children to maturity. While as the only evidence I can think of, of a religion changing attitudes in all of history is that religions with a negative view of suicide do have fewer suicides. But people of all religions war, murder, steal, and worry about raising their family.
But yes, as I noted, we pretty fail at maintaining anything more than complete apathy for the plight of others unless we have a personal relationship. Some of us cry when we hear about a young child being found maimed, but that’s a small number. And you’ll note that a person who will cry about a little blond girl who’s been mutilated won’t notice a similar article about a little black boy.
We do care about our country though–and that’s far more than a few hundred people. Using a formula for average income growth and the number of American soldiers who have died, you can calculate who will win as president, the incumbent or the challenger. When we’re attacked by terrorists, there’s an immediate cry to smash the attacker’s nation. We might not know any of the people who died, but our interest in the well-being of our group is still an important force.
But so to bring this back to Democrat versus Republican, I would say that you can try and hold either side up to lofty goals. You can say that the Democrats want a giving, egalitarian society because that’s nice. But it’s almost certain that they are simply voting for whatever benefits them personally. If they view themselves as being more susceptible to being without work, to not planning ahead to their retirement, to falling prey to people who are more cut-throat, they’ll vote for the people who say that they’re going to coddle and keep baby warm. This is entirely selfish. People who don’t want to get pulled back by extra taxes and various other restrictions that impede their progress for the sake of wimps and layabouts, vote for the team who says the heck with that. Again, this is selfish.
There is no side that’s altruistic. Neither side will present itself as being so, but that’s still the way it is.
I agree with you here. Ruminator’s attempt to use the Dunbar number to prove the non-viability of large group efforts is silly.
Chimps are not monogamous. Neither are bonobo.
And religious faith–not just religious identification, which is in-group mentality & cultural tagging, but serious religious faith–does change people. I’ve seen it in my own family. Philosophical & religious beliefs are a form of self-conditioning: training the mind to behave in a “better” way. You can find it in Yogis, Sikhs, Buddhists of various flavors, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others–in the minority of persons that become committed to radical goodness & charity.
The rest of your quote is substantially true for a great number of people. Mostly true for most? Not necessarily, but maybe
I think rather that each party tries to set itself up as “good” in some way, playing to altruism &/or idealism, while also trying to play to selfishness. They just approach it in different ways.
In short, no, this cannot be defended logically. It does not follow in any way from observed data on how people actually organize socially. It is not compatible with good theory that does make testable predictions on social and political organization. It’s vaguely interesting, but my gut tells me it will end up in the same pseudoscientific dustbin with cranionetry, phrenology, and physiognomy.
We aren’t either of those. That we seem to prefer mating for life, across all societies, indicates that it’s probably a natural state. That we cheat fairly commonly and have had temple prostitutes, ritual orgies, and so on indicates that we still like to sleep about even if we prefer a primary mate.
But I never claimed that just because a group is small that it guarantees perfection. Even in a tiny nuclear family, a father could get mad at his daughter and kill her in a fit of rage. A mother could disown her son and exclude him from her will leaving him homeless. Cain & Abel, etc, etc.
We’re using different standards (semantics) of “viability.” To me, the world already proves that large groups are dysfunctional with regards to economic policies. My standard for viability is to see a nation engineer egalitarian policies fair for everyone, with zero public debt, and near-zero government corruption. To accomplish this type of society, it seems obvious the people must have an emotional feedback loop. Institutional laws are not enough because citizens who are disconnected socially from other citizens will not feel guilt over gaming or flouting their own regulations designed for equality.
Even several distasteful aspects of capitalism depend on groups taking advantage of others. For example, credit cards charges high interest rate of 26% even if the cardholder was never late and has a good credit score. Does a mother typically charge her children 26% intrest on a loan? Does a friend do typically that to another friend? Layering more laws and regulations does not stop the mistreatment of our fellow man – it changes the specific mechanism of it. Something more is needed: the underlying community empathy. An unsophisticated response might be, “just pass a law against 26% interest rates!”. In that case, all you’ve done is make the group find other mechanisms of profit instead of interest rates – such as higher application fees. You see, you’ve legislated the “interest rate” but not the “community empathy.”
I see no evidence that we’ve found the magic institutional invention that can substitute emotional community feedback loops.
Actually, the pseudoscience is to claim that today’s laws, institutions, and economic policies are “viable” (again, I emphasize my standard of “viability”). Thomas Hobbes’ social contract gets us past barbaric raids of our neighbors’ house for food and raping their wives. But what’s the technology to legislate community unity – at the scale of 300 million people – spread across 2000 miles? Maybe Twitter? We legislate that all citizens are required to Twitter a random person in each city everyday? Or a Nationwide Christmas gift exchanges? Or a visiting alien spaceship that wants to destroy us so we unite to fight a common enemy?
If you’re of the mindset that laws work because European nations have UHC and a lower Gini coefficient, that’s ok. However, we can’t continue this discussion because that’s not the standard of community and economic harmony I’m talking about.
We used to have usury laws in this country, prohibiting excessive rates of interest. We can prohibit behaviors of many kinds, but then politicians run on the “intrusiveness of regulations.” By your analysis, this is the intrusiveness of regulations that impede our intuitively appealing ability to take advantage of our neighbors.
Even aside from questions about how language and culture affect human social cohesion in ways that make us different from primates, there are a lot of important biological differences. One reason human social behavior cannot be easily extrapolated from primate social behavior is that our evolutionary arc involved the development of much less aggressive and more cooperative personality traits. We know the various traits in other mammals that are associated with breeding domestication (e.g. lowered aggression), such as small adrenal glands, etc. And we find these same traits becoming dominant in humans around the time we started living in groups larger than families. So this actually suggest that one of the main ways our genetic makeup differs from that of our primate ancestors is that we’re much more cooperative in groups than they are.
As a side note, it is nice to see Maeglin back and posting. (Maybe I only imagined it, but I feel like I hadn’t seen you around in awhile.)
How do you define “fairness”? Is it fair that everyone gets an equal say and an equal share of the resources or should those who contribute more have more say?
In my annecdotal experience, I think the Dunbar number is horseshit anyhow. Even in small groups, there is always some social misfit who is treated unfairly. Now maybe in a chimp community they would just bash him with a rock.
The problem that I think the OP is alluding to is that once a group reaches a certain size, some sort of formal governing structure is required. And like all governing structures, the challenge is to make sure that it works to provide for all the people it governs, not just consolidate power to perpetuate its own existance.
